The setting was the financial district but the mood was celebratory at the 59th annual National Book Award ceremony on November 19, held at the ornate Cipriani ballroom on Wall Street. The election of Barack Obama served as a touchstone in much of the commentary, from host Eric Bogosian's glee that our president-elect is both “a reader and a writer,” to Literarian Award winner Barney Rosset's amazement as “America, magically, impossibly, turns its gaze to a progressive agenda.” Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese-American feminist writer, was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution, and thanked the late John Leonard for championing her; she also cited “Obama's language of inclusion” as a source of hope. The Young People's award went to Judy Blundell, who had written four dozen work-for-hire books under a pseudonym before finding her own voice in What I Saw and How I Lied. Mark Doty won the poetry prize, and thanked, among others, his new husband. In Nonfiction, Annette Gordon-Reed, a crowd favorite, won for her study of the entangled Hemings and Jefferson families in 18th-century Virginia; and Peter Matthiessen, long an ardent environmental activist, won in Fiction for his three-part novel about the exploitation of the Everglades in the early 20th century.